Gone the way of magazines

When we opened up the website and the blog a couple of months ago, I reactivated my old Google Adsense account as a matter of course.  I have never and will never generate enough traffic to make a living off of internet ads, but it was nice back in the day to pick up enough money to buy popsicles for the kids or something out of basically nowhere.

Apparently, things have changed.

I thought it was pretty cool that everything at Adsense is automated now.  No more fiddling around with scripts for ad placement - Google promised to just insert ads in suitable places on the website automatically.  I signed up with the new website, clicked the 'auto ads' button, and.... nothing happened.​  

Hmmm...  I assumed I missed a step in the setup process and decided to just leave it all as is because the extra work wasn't worth a couple of popsicles per year.

A few days later I noticed a couple little ads showing up in the sidebar of the blog. Okay.  There was a delay, I see.  Cool.​  And then I forgot about it all for real.

Until tonight.

Having been busy with putting the new online store together, it has been quite a while since I have personally taken a look at the content pages of the rest of the website.  I mean, I have seen it all before... It would be really weird to look at our own website every day.  Maybe.  As a matter of fact, my husband does not even read my blog posts.  I am talking to you, Dave.

On a complete whim (and also because I was procrastinating about going to bed), I started clicking through the navigation menu on the website tonight.  And that's when I saw them:  IRRITATING BLINKING GAUDY IRRELEVANT ADS EVERYWHERE.  Everywhere.  They were crammed between pictures... between paragraphs... at the top of the pages... at the bottom...  There were five or six of them per page.  

And I have no idea how long it has been like that.  Apparently, once our website traffic started to go up a little bit, the Google bots went into full berserker mode and populated every blank space which I had wanted to remain blank with some annoying ad.  

I am pretty old-school and remember a time when the internet was more than click-bait and pop-up ads.  I remember actual content and actual people and actual information.  It is a shame that it seems to have gone the way of the print magazine -- 50 pages of glossy full-page ads to get to a ten paragraph article.

If you had been subjected to any of this before tonight on our website, please accept my sincerest apologies.  I have disabled auto ads.  Or.. I think I have... In the same way that turning auto ads on did nothing for a few days, turning auto ads off does not seem to do much either.  Soon... hopefully very soon... they should go back to wherever they came from.

Now to actually go to bed... 

Posted by Anita

Will just buy her own popsicles.